forked from sheetjs/sheetjs
36 lines
1.8 KiB
Markdown
36 lines
1.8 KiB
Markdown
|
## Philosophy
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
<details>
|
||
|
|
<summary><b>Philosophy</b> (click to show)</summary>
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
Prior to SheetJS, APIs for processing spreadsheet files were format-specific.
|
||
|
|
Third-party libraries either supported one format, or they involved a separate
|
||
|
|
set of classes for each supported file type. Even though XLSB was introduced in
|
||
|
|
Excel 2007, nothing outside of SheetJS or Excel supported the format.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
To promote a format-agnostic view, js-xlsx starts from a pure-JS representation
|
||
|
|
that we call the ["Common Spreadsheet Format"](#common-spreadsheet-format).
|
||
|
|
Emphasizing a uniform object representation enables radical features like format
|
||
|
|
conversion (e.g. reading an XLSX template and saving as XLS) and circumvents the
|
||
|
|
"class trap". By abstracting the complexities of the various formats, tools
|
||
|
|
need not worry about the specific file type!
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
A simple object representation combined with careful coding practices enables
|
||
|
|
use cases in older browsers and in alternative environments like ExtendScript
|
||
|
|
and Web Workers. It is always tempting to use the latest and greatest features,
|
||
|
|
but they tend to require the latest versions of browsers, limiting usability.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
Utility functions capture common use cases like generating JS objects or HTML.
|
||
|
|
Most simple operations should only require a few lines of code. More complex
|
||
|
|
operations generally should be straightforward to implement.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
Excel pushes the XLSX format as default starting in Excel 2007. However, there
|
||
|
|
are other formats with more appealing properties. For example, the XLSB format
|
||
|
|
is spiritually similar to XLSX but files often tend up taking less than half the
|
||
|
|
space and open much faster! Even though an XLSX writer is available, other
|
||
|
|
format writers are available so users can take advantage of the unique
|
||
|
|
characteristics of each format.
|
||
|
|
|
||
|
|
</details>
|
||
|
|
|